Q&A with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

MOVIES

Writer/directors Tim Heidecker, left, and Eric Wareheim, from the film "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Victoria Will) less

Writer/directors Tim Heidecker, left, and Eric Wareheim, from the film "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Park City, ... more

Photo: Victoria Will, Associated Press

Photo: Victoria Will, Associated Press

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Writer/directors Tim Heidecker, left, and Eric Wareheim, from the film "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Victoria Will) less

Writer/directors Tim Heidecker, left, and Eric Wareheim, from the film "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Park City, ... more

Photo: Victoria Will, Associated Press

Q&A with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

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Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are a throwback to the golden age of comedy, when duos such as Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy filled screens big and small with laughter.

The new comedy team of Tim & Eric has taken a very 21st century route to success, putting sketches on the Internet before scoring a regular gig on the Cartoon Network.

Now Tim, 36, and Eric, 35, have written, directed and co-starred in their first movie, "Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie." They came to San Francisco to talk about their brand of humor.

Q:Your type of humor appeals to that much-sought-after demographic: young people. How do you define what you have?

Tim: There is an individualism to it, and there is a clear personal element to it. It is very clearly two guys making their own stuff. Audiences can relate to us as people. It is also post-comedy, in a way. Everyone's heard the same joke a million times and knows the setups. They are tired of the mass-marketed entertainment served on the networks. We try to go against that grain and do things from a different angle. There are a lot of young, well-educated, artistic people out there that like to be entertained.

Eric: People follow our path of starting with these really crappy videos on the Internet and going all the way to a TV show and now to a movie. That this is something different is what excites people and keeps our fans loyal to us. They want to see how far we can go and how big we can get.

Q: Your cast includes Jeff Goldblum, John C. Reilly, Will Farrell and Zack Galifianakis. Did their names helped to get "Billion Dollar Movie" made?

Tim: They literally got the movie funded. Their involvement gave the distributor sort of the confidence that "OK, at the very least, worst-case scenario, we have a movie with these guys in it."

Q:Did they work for less than usual salaries?

Tim: Everyone was paid scale.

Eric: These people are our friends. They just wanted to help out.

Q: Your film is about novice directors getting $1 billion to make a movie that stars Johnny Depp. The actor looks like Depp, but isn't.

Eric: We originally wanted to cast a real movie star - Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt or George Clooney. We went to their agents. We were close with Clooney.

Tim: We felt like it would only work if it was literally one of those three people. I think anyone else would be a bummer. Like Bruce Willis, for example. Wouldn't work. You'd go, "Yeah, I've seen him make fun of himself." So when we kind of got down to the wire with it and we had worked with some of these impersonators before and that just came up as an idea, and it turned out to be a funnier idea. It reinforced the idea of how stupid we were with the money. We were fooled. We were conned.

Q:What was your actual budget?

Tim: It was under $3 million. It was very small budget for the scope of the movie we made.

Eric: We sat near each other. Class was kind of boring, so we started sending each other notes. We got yelled at by the professor and asked to see him after class. It was just love at first sight at that point.

Tim: That's comedy love.

Q:So you had similar senses of humor. It's a big leap from that to becoming a comedy duo.

Tim: We never really thought that this would be a viable career doing this absurd comedy that we thought was funny in our heads. So we were in film schools to become directors of serious movies, we thought. We kind of didn't know what we were going to do and kind of messed around in the wilderness of postcollege jobs. But we would always do prank phone calls or little videos or animation on the side. They all started to congeal. We kind of got encouraged to see if we could take it to the next level. So we put together a Tim & Eric video and sent it out to people, promoted it in our own way. Branded it.

Q:Was it always Tim & Eric rather than Eric & Tim?

Tim: It just flowed better that way. (Points at Eric) But I don't know - it might have been something else in your mind.

Q:Did you look to other comedy teams for inspiration?

Tim: Abbott and Costello were huge for me as a very young person.

Eric: Also the Three Stooges. Even though some of our humor is kind of absurd, if you want to call it that, there is a lot of just classic physical comedy - two guys rolling around fighting each other, a lot of like sound effects when they hit each other. That's all classic Three Stooges.

Tim: We always put ourselves in that situation of trying to get ahead. That is what funny is. Guys starting with nothing and then being idiotic about making the wrong choices, doing stupid things. There is nothing funny about a well-adjusted, intelligent person making the right choices.

Q:With most comedy duos, one is the stooge and the other the straight man. Was that a model you considered?

Eric: We didn't really study comedy. When we started making things together. We didn't think about straight man/funny man. We would try new things. One of us would be the woman and then we would both be women. It was a very experimental thing.

Q:Do you see yourself always performing together?

Tim: As long as it is a positive thing. Eventually we are going to get to an age where it is not going to be funny to see us goofing around on camera, and we will have to figure that out. But for the time being, yes. {sbox}